Open library
The essential reading of generative AI and agents, open in a clean reading view, with Meow and Standard summaries when available. No account needed to read.
560 papers · 558 with a Meow summary · 333 posts
The selected papers and blogs: the essential papers of generative AI and agents, and the key lab publications and essays, each with Meow and Standard summaries.
Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans et al.
We explore how generating a chain of thought—a series of intermediate reasoning steps—significantly improves the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning. In particular, we show how such reasoning abilities emerge naturally in sufficiently large language models via a simple method called chain-of-…
Takeshi Kojima, Shixiang Shane Gu, Machel Reid et al.
Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are widely used in many sub-fields of natural language processing (NLP) and generally known as excellent few-shot learners with task-specific exemplars. Notably, chain of thought (CoT) prompting, a recent technique for eliciting complex multi-step reasoning through step-by-step…
Xuezhi Wang, Jason Wei, Dale Schuurmans et al.
Chain-of-thought prompting combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose a new decoding strategy, self-consistency, to replace the naive greedy decoding used in chain-of-thought prompting. It first samples a diverse set of reasoni…
Shunyu Yao, Dian Yu, Jeffrey Zhao et al.
Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference. This means they can fall short in tasks that require exploration, strategic lookahead, or where initial decisions pl…
Maciej Besta, Nils Blach, Ales Kubicek et al.
We introduce Graph of Thoughts (GoT): a framework that advances prompting capabilities in large language models (LLMs) beyond those offered by paradigms such as Chain-of-Thought or Tree of Thoughts (ToT). The key idea and primary advantage of GoT is the ability to model the information generated by an LLM as an arbitr…
Karl Cobbe Vineet Kosaraju Mohammad Bavarian Mark Chen Heewoo Jun Łukasz Kaiser Matthias Plappert Jerry Tworek Jacob Hilton Reiichiro Nakano Christopher Hesse John Schulman
State-of-the-art language models can match human performance on many tasks, but they still struggle to robustly perform multi-step mathematical reasoning. To diagnose the failures of current models and support research, we introduce GSM8K, a dataset of 8.5K high quality linguistically diverse grade school math word pr…
Hunter Lightman Vineet Kosaraju Yura Burda Harri Edwards
In recent years, large language models have greatly improved in their ability to perform complex multi-step reasoning. However, even state-of-the-art models still regularly produce logical mistakes. To train more reliable models, we can turn either to outcome supervision, which provides feedback for a final result, or…
Eric Zelikman, Yuhuai Wu, Jesse Mu et al.
Generating step-by-step "chain-of-thought" rationales improves language model performance on complex reasoning tasks like mathematics or commonsense question-answering. However, inducing language model rationale generation currently requires either constructing massive rationale datasets or sacrificing accuracy by usi…
Eric Zelikman, Georges Harik, Yijia Shao et al.
When writing and talking, people sometimes pause to think. Although reasoning-focused works have often framed reasoning as a method of answering questions or completing agentic tasks, reasoning is implicit in almost all written text. For example, this applies to the steps not stated between the lines of a proof or to…
Charlie Snell, Jaehoon Lee, Kelvin Xu et al.
Enabling LLMs to improve their outputs by using more test-time computation is a critical step towards building generally self-improving agents that can operate on open-ended natural language. In this paper, we study the scaling of inference-time computation in LLMs, with a focus on answering the question: if an LLM is…
Bradley Brown, Jordan Juravsky, Ryan Ehrlich et al.
Scaling the amount of compute used to train language models has dramatically improved their capabilities. However, when it comes to inference, we often limit models to making only one attempt at a problem. Here, we explore inference compute as another axis for scaling, using the simple technique of repeatedly sampling…
Inference scaling empowers LLMs with unprecedented reasoning ability, with reinforcement learning as the core technique to elicit complex reasoning. However, key technical details of state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are concealed (such as in OpenAI o1 blog and DeepSeek R1 technical report), thus the community still str…
Zichen Liu, Changyu Chen, Wenjun Li et al.
DeepSeek-R1-Zero has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) at scale can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs without supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we critically examine R1-Zero-like training by analyzing its two core components: base models and RL. We investigate a wide range of base models, in…
Edward Yeo, Yuxuan Tong, Morry Niu et al.
Scaling inference compute enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs), with long chains-of-thought (CoTs) enabling strategies like backtracking and error correction. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial method for developing these capabilities, yet the conditions under which long CoTs emerge rem…
Luyu Gao, Aman Madaan, Shuyan Zhou et al.
Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated an impressive ability to perform arithmetic and symbolic reasoning tasks, when provided with a few examples at test time (“few-shot prompting”). Much of this success can be attributed to prompting methods such as “chain-of-thought”, which employ LLMs for both und…
Aitor Lewkowycz, Anders Andreassen, David Dohan et al.
Language models have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of tasks that require natural language understanding. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art models have generally struggled with tasks that require quantitative reasoning, such as solving mathematics, science, and engineering problems at the college level.…
Aman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta et al.
Like humans, large language models (LLMs) do not always generate the best output on their first try. Motivated by how humans refine their written text, we introduce Self-Refine, an approach for improving initial outputs from LLMs through iterative feedback and refinement. The main idea is to generate an initial output…
Denny Zhou, Nathanael Schärli, Le Hou et al.
Chain-of-thought prompting has demonstrated remarkable performance on various natural language reasoning tasks. However, it tends to perform poorly on tasks which requires solving problems harder than the exemplars shown in the prompts. To overcome this challenge of easy-to-hard generalization, we propose a novel prom…
Peiyi Wang, Lei Li, Zhihong Shao et al.
In this paper, we present an innovative process-oriented math process reward model called **Math-Shepherd**, which assigns a reward score to each step of math problem solutions. The training of Math-Shepherd is achieved using automatically constructed process-wise supervision data, breaking the bottleneck of heavy rel…
Aviral Kumar, Vincent Zhuang, Rishabh Agarwal et al.
Self-correction is a highly desirable capability of large language models (LLMs), yet it has consistently been found to be largely ineffective in modern LLMs. Current methods for training self-correction typically depend on either multiple models, a more advanced model, or additional forms of supervision. To address t…
Shibo Hao, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, DiJia Su et al.
Large language models (LLMs) are restricted to reason in the “language space”, where they typically express the reasoning process with a chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve a complex reasoning problem. However, we argue that language space may not always be optimal for reasoning. For example, most word tokens primarily en…
Miles Turpin, Julian Michael, Ethan Perez et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT explanations as the LLM’s process for solving a task. This level of transparency into…
Yanda Chen Joe Benton Ansh Radhakrishnan Jonathan Uesato Carson Denison John Schulman Arushi Somani Peter Hase Misha Wagner Fabien Roger Vlad Mikulik Samuel R. Bowman Jan Leike Jared Kaplan Ethan Perez Alignment Science Team, Anthropic
Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model’s CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effectiveness of such monitoring hinges on CoTs faithfully representing models’ actual reasoning processes. We evaluate CoT faithfulness of state-…
Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh et al.
Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insuff…
Zhihong Shao, Peiyi Wang, Qihao Zhu, Runxin Xu, Junxiao Song
Mathematical reasoning poses a significant challenge for language models due to its complex and structured nature. In this paper, we introduce DeepSeekMath 7B, which continues pre-training DeepSeek-Coder-Base-v1.5 7B with 120B math-related tokens sourced from Common Crawl, together with natural language and code data.…
Sewon MinXinxi LyuAri HoltzmanMikel ArtetxeMike LewisHannaneh HajishirziLuke Zettlemoyer
Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn—perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little understanding of how the model learns and which aspects of the demonstrations contribute to e…
Johannes von Oswald, Eyvind Niklasson, Ettore Randazzo et al.
At present, the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. In this paper, we suggest that training Transformers on auto-regressive objectives is closely related to gradient-based meta-learning formulations. We start by providing a simple weight constructio…
Sang Michael Xie, Aditi Raghunathan, Percy Liang et al.
Large language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have the surprising ability to do in-context learning, where the model learns to do a downstream task simply by conditioning on a prompt consisting of input-output examples. The LM learns from these examples without being explicitly pretrained to learn. Thus, it is unclear wha…
Xinyu Guan, Li Lyna Zhang, Yifei Liu et al.
We present rStar-Math to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can rival or even surpass the math reasoning capability of OpenAI o1, without distillation from superior models. rStar-Math achieves this by exercising “deep thinking” through Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), where a math policy SLM performs test-ti…
Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) is a novel approach using two small neural networks recursing at different frequencies. This biologically inspired method beats Large Language models (LLMs) on hard puzzle tasks such as Sudoku, Maze, and ARC-AGI while trained with small models (27M parameters) on small data ($\sim$ 1…
Zixuan Fu, Bingxiang He, Yuxin Zuo et al.
On-policy distillation (OPD) combines student-generated rollouts with dense token-level supervision from a teacher. Existing work has mainly studied its algorithmic behavior, leaving the role of training data unclear. We examine this role at the data-minimal limit by training on a single query. One-shot OPD keeps impr…
Yijiang Li, Bingyang Wang, Yijun Liang et al.
On-policy (Self-)Distillation (OPD / OPSD) has shown strong potential for post-training large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods still rely heavily on external supervision, including ground-truth signals, environmental feedback, or guidance from larger models, and therefore fall short of genuine “self”-…
Wenhan Ma, Jianyu Wei, Liang Zhao et al.
Modern large language models (LLMs) rely on reinforcement learning during post-training to push specific capabilities, yet integrating multiple capabilities into one model remains hard. Existing methods, such as Off-Policy Finetune and Mix-RL, are either inefficient or lose performance. In this work, we propose **Mult…
Zhennan Shen, Yanshu Li, Qingyu Yin, Chak Tou Leong, Zhilin Wang Yanxu Chen, Rongduo Han, Sunbowen Lee, Yi R. Fung HKUST Brown University Zhejiang University Hong Kong PolyU USTC BUPT Nankai University BIT
On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used to improve large language model reasoning, but its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize the trajectory of OPD updates in parameter space and compare it with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). A…
Xingrun Xing, Haoqing Wang, Boyan Gao et al.
On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a fundamental technique for efficient post-training of large language models (LLMs), with broad applications in agent learning, multi-task enhancement, and model compression. However, OPD training becomes unstable when the teacher and student distributions differ substantially, as teach…
Yuanyi Wang, Su Lu, Yanggan Gu et al.
On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts with token-level teacher supervision. Recent selective OPD methods exploit the non-uniformity of OPD signals by prioritizing high-entropy or high-disagreement tokens. We revisit this principle and ask: which token-level teacher signals are actually lear…
Yaxuan Li, Yuxin Zuo, Bingxiang He et al.
On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a core technique in the post-training of large language models, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. This paper provides a systematic investigation of OPD dynamics and mechanisms. We first identify that two conditions govern whether OPD succeeds or fails: (i) the…
Binbin Zheng Xing Ma Yiheng Liang Jingqing Ruan Xiaoliang Fu Kepeng Lin Benchang Zhu Ke Zeng Xunliang Cai University of Science and Technology of China Meituan LongCat Interaction Team Nanjing University Fudan University Huazhong University of Science and Technology https://github.com/machine981/SCOPE
On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) alleviates this by introducing dense, token-level KL supervision from a teache…
Qihan Ren, Peng Wang, Ruikun Cai et al.
A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes. We revisit this claim for reasoning SFT with long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and find that cross-domain generalization is not absent but conditional, jointly shaped by op…
Chenxu Yang, Chuanyu Qin, Qingyi Si et al.
On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a popular training paradigm in the LLM community. This paradigm selects a larger model as the teacher to provide dense, fine-grained signals for each sampled trajectory, in contrast to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which only obtains sparse signals from…